Weekly WiT (7/19/17): Martine Cadet, Infor Inc.

Woman in Tech of the Week (7/19/17)

Martine Cadet, Vice President of Global Talent Enablement, Infor Inc.

Companies may want to hire talented people with a range of educational and work experience for a number of reasons. Some say that diverse and even dissonant opinions help formulate broadly appealing advertisements, for example. But old habits in the human resources department die hard. Many companies hire predictably from the same talent pool year after year. So how can they reach out and attract fresh blood into their ranks?

“They need to stop being corporate and stop being political. I don’t know how else to say it,” said Martine Cadet, vice president of global talent enablement and head of the Educational Alliance Program at Infor Inc.

Infor began exploring unconventional means of cultivating and attracting talent with its Educational Alliance Program in 2014. The alliance partners with colleges, universities and nonprofit organizations to introduce Infor products and technologies to students across multiple disciplines.

“Through their professors, they learn hands-on, immersive technologies that businesses run on each and every single day,” Cadet said in during an interview at the recent Inforum event in New York. Branching outside the expected Stanford-MIT tech nexus is an intrinsic part of the mission, she told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.